Predictive Dialer Featured Article

Outbound and Predictive Dialer Markets to Grow: DMG Consulting

The market for predictive dialer or outbound dialing solutions is expanding--it did not die with Do Not Call regulations and restrictions on marketing ‘robocalls’—driven by the demand for outbound notifications followed by agent-assisted calls for customer care and collections. Companies are discovering outbound calls and notifications is win-win: enabling superior customer-retaining service and cutting costs over staffing for unpredictable live-agent inbound calls.

DMG Consulting LLC projects that outbound IVR notification market will grow by 20 percent, 18 percent and 16 percent, respectively between 2010 and 2012 with traditional live agent dialing market will grow by six percent, seven percent and eight percent respectively over the same period. It estimates that the worldwide outbound dialing market generated $440 million in revenue in 2008. Full year 2009 numbers are not yet available.

The projections and calculations appear in DMG Consulting’s 2010 Outbound Dialing Market Research Report. The 50-page report explores outbound market trends, projections, best practices, the competitive landscape and it profiles the leading vendors.

The 2010 Outbound Dialing Market Research Report reveals that the outbound industry is entering a new era ripe with opportunity. With United States and global regulations it says limiting the type and quantity of outbound contacts to consumers, and the challenging economic environment, companies are undertaking innovative proactive customer care, notification and collections initiatives, breathing new life into their outbound dialing solutions.

“Despite regulations limiting outbound calling to unwelcoming prospects, dialing is not going away so long as consumers continue to invite companies to reach out to them with useful information,” said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. “The new era of dialing brings with it opportunities for enterprises to build dialing strategies that help them achieve a competitive advantage through proactive customer care, notification and early-stage collections.”

The 2010 Outbound Dialing Market Research Report confirms that the competitive landscape is complex; it involves vendors from a number of technology categories, including voice switch manufacturers, contact center vendors, stand-alone outbound providers, hosting/software-as-a-service, or “SaaS (News - Alert),” providers, outsourcers and open source-based telephony solutions.

DMG has identified 40 vendors in all that offer outbound dialing functionality. The five vendors that lead the market – Avaya, Aspect, Noble Systems, Genesys and Cisco (News - Alert)--are profiled in detail in the report’s functional and technical vendor comparison which looks at features and capabilities of each company's offerings from routing and blending to compliance and security.

In addition to market trends, growth projections and extensive vendor profiles, the 2010 Outbound Dialing Market Research Report also explores what an ideal dialing solution includes. It reveals eight general dialing best practices to help end users maximize the utilization of and benefits realized from outbound campaigns.

“The 2010 Outbound Dialing Market Research Report fills an information void, delivering rich data on an evolving and critically important sector of the contact center market,” Fluss said. “DMG develops reports such as this one to continuously educate enterprise executives and managers on the role that the contact center plays in a successful enterprise -- from revenue generation to customer satisfaction.”

What Are Related Definitions You Should Know?

Related definitions that you should know as you increase your understanding of predictive dialers include:

Dialer: generic term for any computer-driven device that places outbound calls and connects the answered calls to an agent or operator.

Agent: telephone professional to whom a predictive dialer sends the ready call.

Predictive Dialer: Predictive dialing was introduced for the purpose of increasing efficiency within calling centers. They are computer based system that automatically dial groups of telephone numbers, and then passes live calls to available agents. The SpitFire Enterprise dialer utilizes sophisticated algorithms to speed up and slow down the call rate based on, number of available agents, number of available lines, the campaign’s average call time and other statistical information.

Quick Connect: Quick Connect allows your agents to log in one-to-one with a phone line. This option is great for B2B purposes, especially when your agent needs to be on the phone line through the entire call.

Fixed Dialing: Fixed Dialing gives your call center manager the power to manually set the volume of calls. The software will then automatically dial a predetermined number of lines per agent. Fixed dialing is ideal for political campaigns, charity campaigns, and other situations drop call ratios are not a factor.

SpitFire Enterprise Predictive SEP is a fully blended call center solution that supports unlimited lines, agents, and campaigns. Its greatest strength is in its flexibility: multiple campaigns can be set up, viewed, and changed with the click of a button. With easy options for customization, data and dispositions can be catered to each campaign. In addition to our user-friendly interface, SEPhighlights full customer data and combines multiple campaigns on one screen. All the information your agents need is accessible at a glance, freeing their energy to focus on what matters: the calls.

Keep It Simple with SpitFire Fully Integrated Call Center Software

Our greatest priority is making your call center run smoothly, and we do that by developing software that is intuitive and easily integrated with your current systems. SEP works seamlessly with most CRM applications and long distance carriers, making it the simplest and most cost-effective solution for your call center.

Benefits of Using a Predictive Dialer

Manages the process of dialing tens of thousands of calls or tens of millions of calls in its lifetime.

Detects the result of the call, as an example: no answer, busy, fax, bad number, answering machine without any presence of human expertise. Consequently saving time by only transferring calls which are voice connects to the agents locally or remotely.

Using predictive dialer increases the productivity of the company by drastically increasing the time agents spend on the phone talking to actual customers or prospective clients.

Predictive dialer users get the ability to organize and better manage the client information, no lost notes scribbled on pieces of paper. The database used by the dialer organizes the calling structure.

The most significant task done by the predictive dialer is to predict, which means always making an effort to get a live call to the available agent with the shortest amount of wait time. This is achieved by self learning algorithms within the predictive dialer to increase or decrease the dial ratio per agent, logged into the system.

Inbound call can be better dealt with by allowing the customers to wait on hold in an IVR system, or a way to leave a message they'd like a callback while the agent is busy talking with other customers.

Most important benefit of a predictive dialer is it reduces expenses for your company over a period of time since you do not need to buy and deploy a complex and sometimes extremely expensive PBX system. Your company will experience return of investment (ROI) in a period of six to twelve months.

A predictive dialing system can effortlessly fit into your companies existing infrastructure since it is software controlled.

The call routing logic and the contact management is all included in one software package. Your call routing logic implemented as per your specifications. Since it is a software package it can easily be upgraded even if you are located remotely with the help of internet.

Provides an added cost effective method of managing the client database by giving the user of the predictive system ability to rework your database on previous call results.

Example:

only redial records which were busy, no answers and answering machines

Do a real time look up against the do not call database saving the predictive dialer user from accidentally calling people who have enrolled in the do National not call registry. This saves the company from lawsuits and others risks conforming to all legal statutes and FCC complaints.